Exploiting user experience from online customer reviews for product design

Understanding user experience (UX) becomes more important in a market-driven design paradigm because it helps designers uncover significant factors, such as user’s preference, usage context, product features, as well as their interrelations. Conventional means, such as questionnaire, survey and self-report with predefined questions and prompts, are used to collect information about users’ experience during various UX studies. However, such data is often limited and restricted by initial setups, and they won’t easily allow designers to identify all critical elements such as user profile, context, related product features, etc. Meanwhile, with widely accessible social media, the volume and velocity of customer-generated data are fast-increasing. While it is generally acknowledged that such data contains important elements in understanding and analyzing UX, extracting them to assist product design remains a challenging issue. In this study, how UX data underlying product design can be isolated and restored from customer online reviews is examined. A faceted conceptual model is proposed to elucidate the crucial factors of UX, which serves as an operational mechanism connecting to product design. A methodology of establishing a UX knowledge base from customer online reviews is then proposed to support UX-centered design activities, which consists of three stages, i.e., UX discovery to extract UX data from a single review, UX data integration to group similar data and UX network formalization to build up the causal dependencies among UX groups. Using a case study on smart mobile phone reviews, examples of UX data discovered are demonstrated and both customers and designers concerned key product features and usage situations are exemplified. This study explores the feasibility to discover valuable UX data as well as their relations automatically for product design and business strategic plan by analyzing a large volume of customer online data.     

Business intelligence in online customer textual reviews: Understanding consumer perceptions and influential factors

With the rapid development of information technology, customers not only shop online—they also post reviews on social media. This user-generated content (UGC) can be useful to understand customers’ shopping experiences and influence future customers’ purchase intentions. Therefore, business intelligence and analytics are increasingly being advocated as a way to analyze customers’ UGC in social media and support firms’ marketing activities. However, because of its open structure, UGC such as customer reviews can be difficult to analyze, and firms find it challenging to harness UGC. To fill this gap, this study aims to examine customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward attributes of hotel products and services based on online customer textual reviews. Using a text mining approach, latent semantic analysis (LSA), we identify the key attributes driving customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction toward hotel products and service attributes. Additionally, using a regression approach, we examine the effects of travel purposes, hotel types, star level, and editor recommendations on customers’ perceptions of attributes of hotel products and services. This study bridges customer online textual reviews with customers’ perceptions to help business managers better understand customers’ needs through UGC.